[QuadList] What Would a Newly Designed Quad VTR Do and Have? Reply by 6/15/2012- (Was Ampex Quad VTR Airflow Requirements)

[C. Park Seward]

Ted,

Some random thoughts.

Heavy frame. As you all know, a 90 minute Quad reel is heave. Need a heavy, strong frame.

Metadata could be how many dropouts and their timecode location, RF level, female guide penetration, head and vacuum air pressure, 

The servo system could be so simple as well as the video. You would  want  a digital TBC of at least 10 bits. You could completely eliminate switching errors and velocity errors.

The heads would use a much better preamp and I'd like to see field replaceable heads.

Audio could have one mono head and one two-track head and a head for the cue track. Of course one for the control track.

I guess the device doesn't need to record.

Decode at the VTR and have SDI with embedded audio out.

Low and high band and why not 525/625 switchable? Maybe super high band?

Replaceable demod card for different frequencies. Be able to reproduce old heterodyne recordings.

I would expect a "standard" VTR head design, not any laser or any other esoteric way to read the tracks. Quad tape is tough. 

Built-in tape cleaner.

Probably still need vacuum to curve the tape into the female guide. What about air bearings? Can ball bearings do the same job?

It has to be about the size of a Quad due to the separation of the video and audio heads. and the size of the reels. The electronics could be made much smaller but still field repairable.  Of course that distance can be shrunk with digital audio delay compensation. And with no erase head, you can make it smaller still.

Best,
Park

C. Park Seward
Cell: 818-535-2747
Home: 541-476-6657
2" Quad and 1" "C" transfers
The Transfer Lab at Video Park
Visit us: http://www.videopark.com



On Jun 3, 2012, at 11:04 AM, Ted Langdell wrote:

> On Jun 2, 2012, at 1:20 PM, Don Norwood wrote:
> 
>> I can remember some spirited debates back "in the day" over the virtues of one machine or another.  I always thought that both RCA and Ampex had their strong and weak points, and taking the best of both would have made an interesting machine.  To some extent, that's what happened in the later models.
> 
> 
> There is sometimes talk about building a "New" Quad VTR.  
> 
> What would the end user want to have the machine do, particularly as mass migration and metadata collection about tape condition and content become more "foreground" in content preservation efforts.  
> 
> What "wish list" items would modern technology enable?
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